Bioacoustics and the Environment
Insects, Trees, and Climate:
The Bioacoustic Ecology of Deforestation and
Entomogenic Climate Change
Documentation:
Hidden Fragility of Complex Systems---—Consequences of Change, Changing Consequences
The Bioacoustic Ecology of Deforestation and Entomogenic Climate Change
The Sound of Light in Trees: The Acoustic Ecology of Pinyon Pines
In the News:
La música de los árboles en la gran ciudad,
La Vanguardia, 1 October 2008, Barcelona, Spain
Jim Crutchfield & David Dunn Interview, Barcelona TV
Jim Crutchfield & David Dunn Interview, El Periodico
en RESONÀNCIA
—Encontre Internacional Noves Fronteres de La Ciencia,
L’Art I El Pensament
La Pedrera, Barcelona, Spain
29, 30 September, & 1 October 2008
Cosas de la vida, El Periodico, 1 October 2008
Al Gore cites SFI research on Meet the Press, INSIDE SFI, September 2008
“Pop Chirp Bite Crunch Chew”, Science News 174:5 (30 August 2008)
Al Gore describes entomogenic climate change
on Meet The Press, 20 July 2008
Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change
Nature 452, 987-990 (24 April 2008)
Composer Records Beetles to Mark Climate Change
David Dunn Interview, National Public Radio, 10 March 2008
Osmosis: What can the Arts do for the Sciences, Jim Crutchfield,
Berkeley Big Bang, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive,
UC Berkeley, 3 June 2008
Mutamorphosis: Challenging Arts and Sciences,
Prague, Czech Republic, 8-10 November 2007
Related News:
New York Times: 18 November 2008
Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West
New York Times: 29 April 2008
The Beetle Factor in a Carbon Calculus
New York Times: 29 December 2007
New York Times: 11 July 2007
Balmy Weather May Bench a Baseball Staple
New York Times: 9 June 2007
As Beetle Threatens, 10,000 Staten Island Trees Die by Chain Saw
People:
Jim Crutchfield, Physicist
David Dunn, Composer
Collaborators:
Richard Hofstetter, Forest ecologist
Jayne Yack: Neuroethologist
Battling Beetles: Research on beetle communication leads to new infestation controls
Exercise:
Google Earth tour of beetle deforestation:
1. Start up Google Earth and fly to British Columbia, Yukon Territory, and Alaska
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2.Catalog the number of bright red forest patches; these are regions of dying pines.
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3.Next to these patches you’ll see grey areas, these are already dead pines.
Accumulating observational evidence suggests an intimate
connection between rapidly expanding insect populations, deforestation, and global climate change. We review the evidence, emphasizing the vulnerability of key planetary carbon pools, especially the Earth's forests that link the micro-ecology of insect infestation to climate. We survey current research regimes and insect control strategies, concluding that at present they are insufficient to cope with the problem's present regional scale and its likely future global scale. We propose novel bioacoustic interactions
between insects and trees as key drivers of infestation population dynamics and the resulting wide-scale deforestation. The bioacoustic mechanisms suggest new, nontoxic control interventions and detection strategies.
